All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

60 Chapters

CHAPTER 41- The Offer

She did not ask him that night.She had meant to. She went home from Priya's withthe whole sensible plan assembled in her head andher oldest friend's voice in her ear, ready, finally, to bea woman who said the frightened thing out loudbefore it grew teeth. And she let herself into the flatand he was in the bedroom on the phone with thedoor pulled most of the way to, and she heard thesharp voice, the Marcus voice, and she stopped in thehallway beside the shelf where Amara's photographsat in its small wooden frame, and she heard him sayit.She was not trying to listen. She would hold on to thatsmall, cold comfort in the days that followed. She wasnot crouched at the door. She was standing in herown hallway taking off her coat, and his voice carriedthe way every voice carried in that flat, and she heard,clearly, in the certain sharp register he kept for oneman alive:It is a serious offer, Marcus. I know it is. Three years. Iknow exactly what it is worth. A pause. The lo

CHAPTER 42-What He Did Not Tell Her

How long, she said again, because he had notanswered, because he was standing in the middle oftheir kitchen with the careful, total stillness of a manwatching the precise thing he had spent three monthsmanaging arrive in the single worst way it could have.Since January, he said. There was an enquiry inJanuary. That was the letter. It turned into a real offerabout a month ago. A formal one.A month, she said.About a month. Yes.She nodded slowly. She was aware, with a horribleclarity, that she was doing the thing, the calm thing,the level voice, the temperature dropping. And shewas aware that he knew she was doing it, that he hadlearned her well enough by now to find the level voicemore frightening than any amount of shouting, that hewould have given anything in that moment for her toraise her voice.You told me, she said. In the dark. Two weeks ago.You said, I will tell you when there is something real totell you. A month ago there was something real to tellme, Damie

CHAPTER 43-The First Day

She went to work the next morning because she didnot know what else to do with her body, and she wasbad at it for the first time in years.She sat across from a woman who had been comingto her for eight months and she lost the thread twicein fifty minutes, came back to the room to find thewoman watching her with mild concern, the patientchecking on the doctor, which was the worst thingthat could happen in that chair and which Olivia hadbuilt her entire professional life around preventing.She got through it. She always got through it. But shewalked the woman to the door at the end and stood inthe empty room afterward with her hand still on thelatch and understood that she had given that hour tosomeone and not actually been in it.She had not texted him. He had not texted her. Thephone sat in her bag through every session, a smalldead weight she was aware of the way you are awareof a bruise, and at lunch she took it out and looked atthe blank screen of it and put it bac

CHAPTER 44- What Marcus Said

On the third day Marcus called her, which she had notknown was possible, because she had never given theman her number.Damien gave it me, Marcus said, before she couldask. Months ago. In case. He did not say in case ofwhat and I did not ask. He is funny like that. Heprepares for the thing he is most afraid of and thenrefuses to name it. He always has.How is he, Olivia said, and hated how fast it came outof her.Bad, Marcus said, with the bluntness of a man whohad no use for cushioning. He trained this morninglike he wanted to break something. The managerpulled him after forty minutes. He is sitting in a flatbeing very calm and very still and it is the worst I haveseen him since the year after the girl died. He paused.You know about the girl.Amara. Yes.Then you know what he does, Marcus said. He goesinside and he locks it and he calls it coping. He did itfor a year after her. Took me eight months to get a fullsentence out of him. He turned a corner eventually,but h

CHAPTER 45- The Breaking

She let herself in with her own key and he was in the living room in the dark.No lamp. No television. No music. Just him in the armchair by the window with the streetlight coming in grey and low through the glass, and the flat so quiet around him that she could hear the city outside doing its ordinary Thursday evening thing, completely indifferent to the fact that the two of them had spent five days not talking in it.He looked up when the door went. He did not stand up. He was watching her the way he watched things that mattered, completely, with his whole weight, and she stood in the doorway of her own flat with her key still in her hand and did not look away from it.You came back, he said. Carefully. Like the wrong answer was still possible.I cancelled two clients, she said. In four years I have not cancelled two clients in the same week. She came all the way in and put her bag down and her key in the bowl and she did not take her coat off yet, because taking her coat off meant

CHAPTER 46- The Conversation They Should Have Had

They had it four days later, on a Saturday morning, atthe kitchen table, with the offer printed out and lyingface up between them on the wood.She had asked to see it on the Wednesday. He hadgone to the drawer, the same drawer he had taken theenvelope from on the second of January and put it inand said nothing, and he had taken the papers outwithout hesitating, which was itself a repair ofsomething, the no-hesitation, the not-guarding itanymore. She had read it that night alone while hewas in the shower, sitting on the edge of the bed,reading the whole of it the way she read a diﬃcultcase, slowly, without reacting until she had all of it.It was more than she had imagined.She had known it was serious. She had heard threeyears and a city and I do not know how to tell her Imight be asking her to give up her whole life, and shehad understood from those fragments that it was real.But she had not known the number, and the numbersat in her chest in a complicated way that ha

CHAPTER 47-The Weighing

It was not a clean week. She would not pretend,afterward, that the two of them sat calmly onopposite sides of a decision and applied logic to ituntil an answer came out. That was not what it was.What it was was a week of low persistent tension thatlived in the flat like a presence, sitting at the table withthem, accompanying each of them separately on thetube, surfacing in small frictions that were never quiteabout what they appeared to be about.On Tuesday he came home from training with theagent voice on him, the particular set of his face shehad learned to read the way she read her clients, theclosed quality, the thing being managed behind theordinary surface. She stood in the kitchen doorwayand looked at him and did not pretend not to see it.Tell me what is on the phone call, she said.He set his bag down. They want an answer in twoweeks. The agent thinks I am stalling. He used aphrase. He said, no offence to your wife, but you donot turn down a club like this for

CHAPTER 48-Priya And The Sister

I need the real version, Olivia said. Not the being-kindversion. Not the one designed to make me feel better.I need both of you to tell me the truth and I need youto do it at the same time so neither of you can softenwhat the other one says.She had summoned them to Priya's kitchen on aThursday afternoon, texting each of them separatelywith the same message, which they had clearlycompared notes on because they both arrived withinfive minutes of each other wearing the face of womenwho had been briefed by the other. Maya came withEsme in the car seat, who slept throughout the entireconversation with the magnificent indifference ofsomeone not yet old enough to have opinions aboutdecisions that were not hers.Olivia laid it out. The offer, the city, the number, thefive days of silence, the coming back, the week ofweighing, the trip she was about to take, the decisionthat was at the end of it. She said it plainly, the wayshe laid things out in a consulting room, everything

CHAPTER 49- The City

They drove up on Thursday and she made herself lookat all of it, the whole length of the motorway north, thecountry changing, the sky going wider, the cityappearing on the horizon in the grey afternoon like afact.The club sent a car. She noticed this and said nothingabout it, but she noted it, the car, the hotel, the personwith the lanyard, the careful architecture of a club thatfully expected to get what it wanted. They were shownthe stadium, the training ground, the facilities, and shewalked alongside Damien through all of it and shewatched his face, which was the only thing she hadcome to watch.She saw it in the tunnel.He walked out of the players' tunnel onto the pitchand she stood at the mouth of it and watched him andit happened, the thing she had known would happenand had needed to see, the pull of it, the clearundeniable gravity of a man standing in a place builtexactly for the thing he was. He was not performing it.He was not even aware of it. He stood at

CHAPTER 50-What She Said Back

They drove home on Friday afternoon and she spentmost of the motorway south thinking.He did not push her. He never pushed her and he wasnot going to start in a car on the M1 when she hadjust told him the words were coming and asked himfor the patience to let them arrive in their own time.He drove and he handed her the coffee from theservice station without being asked and he put musicon low and he let her think, because he was a manwho had waited at a window and could wait a littlelonger.She thought about the street. The blank page of it, theordinary houses, the absence of fear she had bracedfor and not found. She thought about what Maya hadsaid about her body knowing, and about what herbody had said, standing in that street, which was notthe terror she expected but the quiet steady fact of Icould do this. She could. She had proved it to herselfand to him and she had given him the move back,cleared away the excuse of her, and now the decisionwas a real one, unprote

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